Jazz Trumpet Licks

Arturo Sandoval takes a great trumpet solo cadenza on A Night in Tunisia from his album The Best of Arturo Sandoval. I’m mentioning the best part of this recording. Arturo Sandoval starts the solo off with a trumpet cadenza with some really fast trumpet licks. Then Arturo Sandoval changes the whole mood and switches to some nice blues licks. And finally, the band comes back in and Arturo Sandoval continues to play some really nice licks ending on a high note. One last thing I almost forgot to mention is that this is a live trumpet solo. If you don’t own this tune I would recommend getting it asap!

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I got this rhythmic diminished lick listening to a good trombone player friend of mine. It’s a real easy diminished lick to incorporate into your improvised Jazz solos. You don’t have to play this diminished pattern how it is written, be creative and come up with your own variation of the lick.

Here is a sound sample played on trumpet:

How to memorize this diminished lick in 12 keys:

Since this is a diminished lick you’ll only need to learn the lick in 3 keys depending on which note you start on. As you can see, this diminished lick is just going down in half steps a minor 3rd apart, but it skips around a little bit. The stacked minor 3rds in the above example are C, Eb, F#, and A. The easiest way to memorize this diminished lick then is to think in stacked minor 3rds throughout the whole lick knowing that you are just going down a couple half steps between each minor third.

I wanted to let you know about a really fast Jazz trumpet solo of Ryan Kisor on the tune Cherokee from his album entitled Kisor. It’s a really good CD, definitely take a look at it. I don’t know what tempo Ryan Kisor took Cherokee at though.

Ryan Kisor starts Cherokee off soloing right away, no head is played on this recording. There are a lot of good Jazz licks to take advantage of from this recording. Ryan Kisor does this alternate fingering Jazz lick going down a scale one note at a time. The alternate fingering Jazz lick happens so fast that it is hard to write down at first though. I hope you get the CD and enjoy this Jazz trumpet solo.

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